The Decline Whine

The US media has a long history of clucking snidely at Europe. Recently Time magazine added to a longstanding Euro-bashing tradition with an incendiary cover that blared “The Decline and Fall of Europe,” featuring a young London rioter dressed in a hoodie and glaring like a Tolkien wraith from the red flames engulfing the cityscape behind him.

This was not the first time that a major American media outlet had sensationally declared the end of that continent across the Atlantic. In February 2006, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria wrote a column for the Washington Post titled – drumroll please – “The Decline and Fall of Europe.” In fact, pundits in the American media declared the end of Europe on numerous occasions throughout the 2000s. Here’s a small sample of the headlines that appeared during those years in leading U.S. media outlets, trumpeting the imminent collapse of Europe:

Those sorts of gloom and doom stories, penned by U.S. pundits like the Washington Post’s Robert Samuelson and Steven Pearlstein, and America sympathizers like Niall Ferguson, appeared regularly from 2003 until late 2006, when—surprise, surprise—it was discovered that the European economy actually was surging and had equaled and then surpassed the U.S. economy, becoming the largest in the world with more Fortune 500 companies than the United States and China combined.

In fact, an article published in the international version of Newsweek in November 2006 blared the headline, “The Great Job Machine: Despite Its Laggard Reputation, Europe Continues to Grow Faster, and Create More Jobs, than America”—yet that story never appeared in Newsweek’s domestic version.

Another article in BusinessWeek reviewing health care systems in the United States, France, and the United Kingdom gave the nod to France as having the most efficient and affordable system. But it was never published in the US print edition.

To hear the US media tell the story, Europe has always been in crisis, and the European Union always on the verge of fracture. Gloomy news reports from the early 1990s warned that the German economy, the largest in Europe, was “slumped at the razor’s edge.” There were dire predictions of rising unemployment, crime, and taxes to “a level not seen since the Weimar Republic.” Yet by the late 1990s a prospering Germany had become the world’s leading exporter; Germany’s unemployment rate today is a third lower than America’s.

The truth is, just as the American media missed the real story when it came to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the housing bubble, corruption of the credit rating agencies and an imminent economic meltdown, the crystal ball gazers have a terrible track record when it comes to Europe. Even Paul Krugman likes to pile on, writing a recent essay for the New York Times Magazine titled “Can Europe Be Saved?”, and carping that the Germans—one of the few economic bright spots today—“seem to be getting their talking points from the collected speeches of Herbert Hoover.”

Certainly Europe has its share of economic troubles — the continent’s banks are still in precarious shape, and many of the member states are still in recovery from 2008’s global economic earthquake and its many aftershocks, which had its epicenter in the United States. But even in the middle of this economic crisis, Europeans still all enjoy affordable, universal health care, generous retirement pensions, ample vacations, affordable childcare, low cost university education and many other supports for families and individuals that are hallmarks of their social capitalist model. And as the track record shows, American media bashing of Europe began well before the most recent economic collapse. US news outlets seem to always tell their audiences that it’s doomsday time for Europe.

What accounts for this knee-jerk Euro-bashing? Part of it, undoubtedly, is envy. While America foots the bill for being the world’s robo-cop, even as a sixth of the nation has no health care and lives below the poverty line, the allegedly ungrateful Europeans plow their resources into taking care of their families and communities. Social capitalism is outshining Wall Street capitalism. Envy becomes anger, and anger explodes into defaming headlines.

Another explanation is nationalism. Americans are a patriotic people, with a strong belief in their own exceptionalism and, as the dominant power in the post-World War II era, in their pre-eminence. Even the poorest American takes pride in wrapping her or himself in the red, white and blue. Americans seemingly like to hear that Europe is in most ways inferior to America, and react defensively if told otherwise. Media outlets of course know this and pander to their audience’s tastes, but in schizophrenic way. It’s practically unthinkable for a mainstream publication to run a cover story that says “Europe Surpasses America,” yet such stories about China — which is still a developing country where 80 percent of its people are poor — are routine.

Finally, it might stem from Americans’ forgetfulness of their own history. For anyone trying to understand the current state of the European Union and the eurozone, the most apt historical analogy might be the situation in the United States sometime around 1789.

Consider what America was like back then. The thirteen former colonies were torn by regional tensions as they began the arduous and conflict-ridden task of trying to form themselves into a union of member states. They were diverse in their histories, religions, industrial or agrarian orientations, and other characteristics, much like the different E.U. member states. And of course some were slave states while other states were starting to voice opposition to slavery, a centrifugal force that only intensified over the decades.

Young America also had no single currency – each state had its own currency, indeed banks had their own scripts that were used like currency. The new nation also was plagued by debt to domestic as well as foreign creditors. To meet these challenges, the first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, took the lead in designing the beginnings of a modern financial system with a single currency. But he was bitterly opposed by no less than Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

Indeed, Americans were so suspicious of central government that even President George Washington dared not propose raising funds for a standing army. People were so against federal taxes that the first national tax, which was levied on whiskey — chosen as less controversial than other taxes — led to open rebellion in western Pennsylvania, prompting President Washington to march troops there to suppress it.

In short, it took approximately 80 years from its founding – as well as a bloody civil war fought mainly over states’ rights — for America to settle its founding contradictions, cease being a collection of regions, and to become one nation. And during that time the US economy suffered at least seven bank and financial panics that make today’s euro difficulties look mild. Yet America persevered, continuing to define its union.

Europe today has many contradictions and tensions, but nothing on the scale of those that bedeviled the young United States of America. Certainly we see similar echoes playing out in the ongoing evolution of the European Union and the euro zone: tensions between centralized authority versus member state sovereignty, federalism versus states rights, common currency and transfer unions versus state self-reliance, with a half a billion individuals’ lives swept up in the turmoil.

So when you read the next “Europe is dying” headline, remember that “old Europe” actually is very young. Nearly half of the member states have joined since 2004, and the euro dates only to 2002. Like a young America, Europe is in the process of deciding how united it wants to be. Young Europe may never become an exact replica of old America, that is, a United States of Europe, but in any case the Europeans’ noisy and conflicted process will probably take decades of trial-and-error to run its course.

As long as the European appetite for union remains steadfast, and as long as the heart of the enterprise remains beating, Europe will continue to define itself in ways that headlines out of “old America” won’t fathom. This is very much a work in progress, one which at this point can be said to have reached “the end of the beginning,” to borrow Winston Churchill’s useful phrasing.

A provocative, remedy-based perspective on the joint complexities of economic stability and ever expanding technology.–Kirkus Reviews

“Hill hits Silicon Valley darlings like Uber and Airbnb alongside the former online black market Silk Road, right-to-work laws, and factory robots all under the umbrella of “naked capitalism.” He explains how the rise of the “1099 workforce” is not limited to Silicon Valley; more and more traditional jobs in fields like manufacturing are turning to contractors to perform the same tasks full-time employees used to do. In addition to costing workers in benefits and safety nets, misclassifying workers as contractors costs federal and state governments billions of dollars annually in lost tax revenue.” ―Washington Monthly

“For anyone driven crazy by the faux warm and fuzzy PR of the so-called sharing economy Steven Hill’s Raw Deal: How the “Uber Economy” and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers should be required reading… Hill is an extremely well-informed skeptic who presents a satisfyingly blistering critique of high tech’s disingenuous equating of sharing with profiteering…Hill includes two chapters listing potential solutions for the crises facing U.S. workers…Hill stresses the need for movement organizing to create a safety net strong enough to save the millions of workers currently being shafted in venture capital’s brave new world.” ―Counterpunch

“A growing underclass scrambling to make ends meet at the whim of increasingly picky and erratic employers, that number could balloon to 65 million within 10 years, or about half of the domestic workforce, warns Steven Hill in his troubling new book, Raw Deal. This brand of worker abuse cuts across industries and company size. Hill calls out Uber, AirBnb, Merck, Nissan, and dozens of others. Hill does a nice job of putting it in starker, easier-to-understand ways.” ―Washington Independent Review of Books

“Steven Hill’s book Raw Deal is a red-faced, steam-out-the-ears indictment of sharing apps. Yet Hill offers a pragmatic, almost post-ideological solution: “individual security accounts” for workers. Companies that use independent contractors, or offer scant benefits for employees, would have to add on a certain percentage of their pay as a contribution to those accounts, which would cover health care, unemployment insurance, and more. There’d be a mechanism ― and a requirement ― for companies to contribute to the long-term well-being even of workers who aren’t on their traditional payrolls.” ―Boston Globe

“Raw Deal is a book for its time. Steven Hill perfectly captures the anxiety of the American worker in today’s increasingly digital economy. Hill presents some compelling ideas, the most important being something he calls the Economic Singularity. In this unfortunate tipping point, the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few results in economic implosion because the 99 percent can’t afford to buy anything the 1 percent has to sell. The United States is turning into a nation of 1099 workers who eke out a living driving cars, renting rooms and running errands for people who apparently have better things to do with their time. Throw in self-thinking computers and obedient robots, and there won’t be any work left for plain old Homo sapiens…Hill proposes that we offer 1099 workers a new safety net consisting of tax deductions, individual security accounts and multiemployer health care plans. All good ideas.” ― San Francisco Chronicle

This book is a must read for those concerned about how technology is disrupting the way we work and eroding the social safety net, and how policy makers should respond to ensure that the growing number of workers in the “gig” economy earn adequate benefits.—Laura D’Andrea Tyson, UC-Berkeley and former Chair of the US President’s Council of Economic Advisers

“Steven Hill’s groundbreaking book on the part-time, unstable ‘Uber Economy’ shows how a new sub-economy becomes a work of law-flouting regress undermining full-time work. Remote corporate algorithms run riot!”— Ralph Nader, consumer advocate

For many years, Steven Hill’s analysis, commentary and activism have helped shape our understanding of the U.S. political economy. His latest book, Raw Deal is A riveting expose that shows with alarming lucidity what Americans stand to lose if we don’t figure out how to rein in the technological giants that are threatening the American Dream.–Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation

In Raw Deal, Steven Hill documents in frightening detail the ways in which new forms of work promise to plunge US workers and their families into further economic hardship, risk-assumption, and instability. Fortunately, Hill does not simply anticipate catastrophe; he closes the book with an informed call for institutional reforms that would lessen the negative consequences of these potentially dangerous forms of work. Anyone concerned with US working conditions – whether American workers, worker advocates, labor market scholars, or policy-makers – must read this book .— Janet C. Gornick, Professor of Political Science and Sociology, Graduate Center, City University of New York, Director, LIS: Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg

Praise for Expand Social Security Now

“Read this book before you vote. Few issues are more important to your personal economic future. Steven Hill shows what’s at stake, and he offers solutions that Americans of all stripes can agree on.”—Robert B. Reich, author of “Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few”

“Steven Hill has written a barn burner of a book. Or perhaps I should say ‘myth buster,’ because he systematically demolishes the false justifications for slashing Social Security. In place of misplaced animus and misleading arguments, he offers a strong case for dramatically expanding America’s most successful domestic program in an age of rising inequality and widespread financial insecurity.”—Jacob S. Hacker, coauthor of “American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper”, Professor, Yale University

“Steven Hill has written a vigorous defense of Social Security, the country’s most important social program. While most political debate in recent years has focused on ways to cut Social Security or privatize it, Hill goes in the opposite direction and argues for a robust expansion. Hill proposes a Social Security program that would be adequate by itself to support a middle-class retirement.”—Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and author of “Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better Bargain for Working People”

“Steven Hill has produced a dynamite handbook for angry Americans who seek to take back democracy. The true contest is not Republicans versus Democrats. It is the American people versus Washington. And this is the sleeper issue the people can win. The governing elites in both parties are trying to eviscerate Social Security—arguably the most successful and most popular program created by the federal government. Hill explains why the political insiders and their Wall Street patrons are wrong about Social Security. He shows us how to mobilize to defeat the power elites and expand Social Security rather than destroy it.”—William Greider, author of “Come Home, America: The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming Promise) of Our Country”

Praise for Europe’s Promise

Financial Times: “Steven Hill is a lucid and engaging writer. He makes you sit up and think.”

The Economist: “In a new book, Steven Hill extols the European social contract for better government services. Life in Europe is more secure, he argues, and therefore more agreeable.”

Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker: “Like a reverse Alexis de Tocqueville, Steven Hill dauntlessly explores a society largely unknown to his compatriots back home.”

Andrew Moravcsik, Foreign Affairs: “Europe’s Promise is a timely and provocative book . . . the “social capitalist” policies of European countries represent best practices in handling most of the challenges modern democracies face today.”